Sylvia Wolf has been director of the Henry Art Gallery for four weeks now, and already we have a few indications of what she’s made of.

First, Wolf’s exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids—documenting for the first time the young photographer’s first lens love—opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art May 3. This morning, Karen Rosenberg of the New York Times wrote about the show in the context both of Mapplethorpe and the endangered camera. “The beloved instant photograph could not have hoped for a better sendoff,” Rosenberg wrote. I need to get my hands on a copy of the book (cover above), which The Art Newspaper called “compact but surprisingly weighty.”

I met Wolf for the first time on Tuesday, and she struck me as lively and friendly, with a fierce edge. As both a longtime academic and a longtime museum person, she said she feels at home at the Henry, a museum embedded in a university. “It just feels right. I see people with pink hair in slippers holding a cup of coffee at 8 in the morning, and I think, ‘Yeah, this is good.’”

It will probably be some time before we see Wolf’s imprint out in the galleries (not as a curator—she’s said she doesn’t intend to curate—but as a new guiding force), but her first item of business is putting together a department of education and university relations for the museum. In the past, the Henry had an education curator but not a distinct department devoted to education.

During her interviews for the job, Wolf persuaded the UW administration to agree to split the cost of an annual resident for the museum—a scholar, artist, or curator who will bring fresh blood to the city every year. That will probably begin next spring, Wolf said Tuesday.

“The fact that the administration has actually put up some new money to support the Henry’s initiatives is huge,” she said. The fact that Wolf persuaded the administration is huge, too.